Quietrevolution: Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

mattduke · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Oct 28, 2005 Posts: 1326

An elegant design. By twisting the blades into a helix it achieves uniform torque throughout the rotation.

kokoda · Heavy Crude Joined: Aug 24, 2006 Posts: 422

Interesting ... it works regardless of wind direction. I would be interested to see how well it would scale up.

WisJim

Needs to be up another 20 meters or so, minimum, maybe higher depending on surroundings, to get into stronger winds with less turbulence. I haven't seen a vertical axis wind turbine yet that works well enough to use instead of a horizontal axis machine, though.

TreeFarmer · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 317

The 5 m/s that you see on their homepage corresponds to 15 mph? Someone plese check my quick math. If so, that's living in a pretty windy place.

TF

gnm

I've seen that one. It is a nice design but I think it also needs the generator to be run as a motor to "start" it spinning. IMO a major problem. It also still suffers the usual anemic outputs of VAWTs.

This is basically a helical darrieus turbine. Helical savonious designs have been around for a while and are even available commercially. But unfortunately a VAWT is still a VAWT.

One nice thing about VAWT's is that they are not noisy.

-G
_________________
All right, you primitive screw-heads, listen up!

kokoda · Heavy Crude Joined: Aug 24, 2006 Posts: 422

I guess one of the drawbacks is that for at least part of the time it will be spinning into the wind.

That means that it will suffer more drag compared to a horizontal design.

WisJim

As long as we are talking about impractical wind turbines:
http://loopwing.co.jp/
http://solwind.co.nz/vertical.html
http://www.aerotecture.com/
http://cleanfieldenergy.com/wind_competitive.php
http://aes-energie.de/ click on "Windenergie"
http://mag-wind.com/
http://motorwavegroup.com/new/motorwind/index.html
http://www.windside.com/
http://aerojoule.com/en/wind22.html
http://www.ropatec.com/index_n.php?pid=01&lin=3

Some of these could be considered "wacko" and a person wonders who they are trying to fool.

mattduke · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Oct 28, 2005 Posts: 1326

This is the only thread on peakoil.com that makes me happy. It's such a nice design.

Bas

JRP3 · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 23, 2006 Posts: 394

Vermonter · Coal Joined: Aug 21, 2007 Posts: 4 Location: Vermont

It's not that hard to build an axial flux turbine with conventional 3 blades. Lots of write-ups on the 'net.

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html

WisJim

The "otherpower" sit mentioned is a good place for realistic windpower info. I recommend them.